ABSTRACT
When it comes to studying the social world, there are few things that presents themselves with a more spontaneous sense of singularity than the human body. Self-contained, isolated, distinguished by a visible and tangible boundary that separates the “Individual”, the “Subjective” and the “Personal” from its “Environment”, “Society” and “Others”, the body provides the natural template for any type of autonomous, self-regulating system. This is not only true for the natural and the life sciences, but equally applies to the social sciences where, from Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ to Luhmann’s ‘systems theory’, the body has served as ‘the prototypical entity of modern social thought’ (Abbott, 1995: 860). An entity that, furthermore, constitutes the sole mode through which social agents present themselves as “individuals”, occupying a discrete and singular position in time and space and endowed with physical, visible features that define each and every one of them as indisputably “unique”. This spontaneous perception of the individual (body) as a self-sufficient unit harbouring a singular and irreducible essence, the ‘homo clausus’ as described by Norbert Elias’ (1978) in the opening quote, is further reinforced by a host of social conventions that not only ratify (often legally), but sanctify this singularity and effectively transform the body into a Durkheimian ‘sacred object’. Conventions which dictate, for instance, that one can only offer one’s body to others, partly or wholly, within social relationships that have been purged of economic or other “profane” interests, as when one “donates” (never “sells”) one’s blood or organs in a purely altruistic gesture or gives one’s body to another in a sexual act that is deemed to be the ultimate expression of love and commitment (and hence fully opposed to the fleeting, interchangeable exchanges of the “market”). Conventions which also clearly define the legitimate manner and circumstances in which the body’s
sacred boundary can be transgressed, as shown by the highly revealing example of the gynaecological exam, so skilfully dissected by Henslin and Biggs (2007 [1993]), in which male physicians’ contact to female sexual organs is subjected to a highly ritualized act of ‘depersonification and repersonification’ which, in order to safeguard the sacred character of female sexuality, transforms female patients from subjects (patient-as-person) into objects (patient-as-pelvis) back into subjects.
